To start properly, I wanted to really drill down into dementia, people with dementia, and those who care for them.

Understanding Dementia

To start off my research, I first wanted to learn more about dementia itself. I read about the issue from various respected organisations and created a mind map of the key points.

<aside> ▶️ Key Takeaways

• People with the early stages of dementia are generally still able to live independantly with light help.
• Most People with dementia rely on friends or relatives for care.
• Dementia isn’t just bad memory, it’s a range of symptoms. </aside>

Living with Dementia

Next I researched into Living with Dementia, specifically what things people do to make parts of their life easier or to improve their condition.

<aside> ▶️ Key Takeaways

• Dementia specific technology and design play a big role in staying independent.
• Automation and monitoring is important to make life easier and safer.
• Modifications to regular usual interfaces are beneficial to make them easier.
• Organisation and structure are really important.
• Movement and socialising are very important.
• Things shouldn’t be fully automated, keeping the person in control is vital. </aside>

Dementia Carers

I then researched into people who care for someone with dementia, what they do as a carer, and how they care for themselves.

<aside> ▶️ Key Takeaways

• Often helping by managing their life, making sure they’re eating, being where they need to be etc. - very important but tiring and some thing that could be done with design so they can be there more emotionally.
• Can be very difficult due to the person changing - emotional pain.
• Have to engage with them in new ways, change how they talk and behave.
• Activities with them are often simple and short - just to engage brain in some way.
• Caregivers often don’t look after themselves - need their own care too. </aside>

Testimonials

The last topic I wanted to research for this phase was actual people with or who care for someone with dementia. I found this resource of testimonials on DementiaUK which was really useful and I learned a lot from. Being in uni it’s tricky to find people being affected with the issue I want to solve for, so this resource is great as it is essentially the same things I’d take from user interviews. I’ll still do user interviews for this project, but this is really helpful for building up more qualitative data.

Due to the nature of dementia, most of the testimonials come from carers or people recently diagnosed. Most of the testimonials do speak for the person with dementia too, but just wanted to acknowledge that a lot of the user research and interviews for this project will have to come from carers due to dementia being a memory condition.